Anthropology.net

It seems that despite the discovery of what has been described as a 4,000 year-old Bronze Age site which is unique in Europe, the local council are going ahead with their plans to build a road through Rotherwas Ribbon, which they say will give better access to a nearby industrial estate. *correction: people have been objecting to the construction project since January, deeming it to be unnecessary, whilst the discoveries were made once work on the project had begun, (thanks to Rob for pointing out my earlier error). It’s a mystery why the local Council appears intent on bulldozing its plans through any objections, and seems to lack any sense of pride in the heritage of the area it claims to represent…

The Council are seeking to fund the road – which has already started construction – partly through funding from major housing development which has not yet been agreed. The Unitary Development Plan inspector stated that this housing, at Bullinghope, was ‘an unjustified incursion’ into the countryside and out of Hereford’s natural southern boundary. It was taken out of the plan but the Council ignored this and put it back in. This decision was foisted on councillors, combined as it was with other decisions at a chaotic meeting in January which was interrupted by the public when they were not allowed to speak.

Although only a portion of the snake structure will be covered, even those parts either side of it will be ‘preserved beneath earth screening bunds‘, which effectively means that there will be no further access to archaeologists, and neither will be there any opportunity for the public to visit the site and view it for what it is, and within the wider context of other finds that have come to light in the vicinity.

For a fuller and more detailed account of the current situation, please visit the Rotherwas Ribbon site, dedicated to saving the site from further damage, and where there are also details of the history of the road development, as well as petitions which people may feel inclined to support. Read the rest of this entry »

At about 74,000 years ago, Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra erupted in a massive explosion that supposedly rocked the Middle Palaeolithic world to its very foundations, bringing contemporary human populations to their knees, reducing the global population level to around 15,000 individuals, thereby precipitating a so-called bottle-neck of human evolution, as proposed by Stanley Ambrose, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed in this BBC News article from 1998, and in an essay at the Bradshaw Foundation, in the same year. However, recent discoveries made by Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, have now cast doubt on this theory…

(the team)…found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia — an event known as the Youngest Toba Tuff eruption.

The tools from each layer were remarkably similar, and Petraglia says that this shows that the huge dust clouds from the eruption didn’t wipe out the population of tool-using people. “Whoever was there seems to have persisted through the eruption,” he says.

This is the first archaeological evidence associated with the Toba super eruption, says Petraglia, and it contradicts theories that the eruption had a catastrophic effect on the area that its ash blanketed.

Following this eruption, a phase of dramatic global cooling ensued, evidenced by a 6-year global winter, which in turn was followed by the onset of the Würm glaciation event. Petraglia proposes that only modern humans could have survived such an event, giving as his evidence the supposed similarity of the lithic assemblage, and purported others, which he claims correspond with those found in Africa dating to around 100,000 bp, by which time modern anatomically modern humans had been extant there for some 100,000 years. Read the rest of this entry »

From the current edition of Biology Letters published by the Royal Society, comes this intriguing experiment conducted by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with the help of some obliging orangutans; here’s the abstract…

We investigated the use of water as a tool by presenting five orangutans (Pongo abelii) with an out-of-reach peanut floating inside a vertical transparent tube. All orangutans collected water from a drinker and spat it inside the tube to get access to the peanut. Subjects required an average of three mouthfuls of water to get the peanut. This solution occurred in the first trial and all subjects continued using this successful strategy in subsequent trials.

The latency to retrieve the reward drastically decreased after the first trial. Moreover, the latency between mouthfuls also decreased dramatically from the first mouthful in the first trial to any subsequent ones in the same trial or subsequent trials. Additional control conditions suggested that this response was not due to the mere presence of the tube, to the existence of water inside, or frustration at not getting the reward. The sudden acquisition of the behaviour, the timing of the actions and the differences with the control conditions make this behaviour a likely candidate for insightful problem solving.

The full paper is behind a paywall, although it’s quite possible that the contents will be covered accessibly elsewhere in more detail, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see research into the learning abilities of primates, other than chimpanzees, including the linguistic abilities of bonobos. Research of this type helps to further demonstrate that the origins and deployment of our own intelligence may not be as specialised as we have come to believe. It also raises the question of why other primates, while apparently possessing vestiges of the same cognitive abilities as ourselves, have not themselves adopted or developed more complex behaviours of their own, especially during the past few million years in which hominids have been evolving at greatly accelerated rates, for reasons that continue to elude us. (TJ)

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